redacted
by takingoffmyshoes
Summary: a dumping ground for short h/c stories. this was originally going to be for whumptober, but then other things happened, so yeah. marked as complete, but may still be updated if inspiration strikes.
1. Chapter 1

_me, foolishly: i'm gonna do whumptober!_  
_narrator: and then she didn't_

* * *

_. . ._

* * *

The air is full of diamond dust, and thousands of glittering rainbows hang between the snow and sky.

It's beautiful; beautiful and bright.

The sky wheels overhead, piercingly blue and impossibly close. If he tries, he can probably count it. The molecules. The drops of water. The feet, the inches.

He doesn't try, if only because he's distracted by the way he seems to be floating. Heights don't faze him; he just prefers to know why and how he's not on the ground. It's a bit dizzying, so he lets his eyes fall closed. It takes longer than it did the last time.

A puff of damp across his forehead. "держа́ться, Cowboy."

His head doesn't move when he tries to turn away. _Peril_, he says, but his lips don't part, and no air comes out.

He thinks that maybe he's cold.

* * *

"They will come for us," Illya said at first, when Solo was shivering so violently in his drenched clothes that he couldn't stand up and Illya dragged him through the snow to the dilapidated hull of a hunting shelter.

"They will come for us," he said, as lake water seeped into his own clothes and the tremors against his chest threatened to shake something long-lost loose inside of him.

"They will come for us," he said, as Solo shook for all he was worth and Illya rubbed his hair dry with his sleeve and tucked the damp curls beneath his chin and held on.

"They will come for us."

By the time Solo stops shivering, Illya has lost his English. The Russian words are more familiar, but the comfort they bring cannot dispel the cold that is settling deeper into him with every passing minute.

By the time Solo stops shivering, he is saying _hold on _and _please_ and _soon._

By the time breathing becomes a quiet war and every breath a silent battle; by the time the seconds stretch too long between each rasping inhale and Solo starts forgetting to blink – or worse, to open his eyes – he is breathing out patched-up lullabies in clouds of white.

Gradually, Napoleon's breathing shallows, slows, becomes undetectable. His eyes drift shut. His lips darken, stealing color from his face. Illya holds him to his chest and ghosts half formed lyrics into ice-encrusted hair. He can do little more, no matter how he wants to. It is like he is asleep: half of his mind controls exactly none of his body, and the other half is well beyond his reach. The cold will take them both, here in this beautiful wasteland, bathed in the golden light of the frigid, faraway sun.

No one is coming.

* * *

Thunderous vibrations rend the air around him, but he doesn't feel them.

Instead, he hears. Hears, and wishes he hadn't. Wishes he had stayed in the dark and the quiet. He can't feel, has moved far beyond feeling, but somewhere in his mind _awake_ is linked to _pain._

A voice shatters against him, shards piercing the smothering beat of the air. "Illya! Illya, are you— Oh my god, Solo—"

Searing heat presses to the side of his neck. He can't move away, can't even groan that _it_ _burns_. This is the feeling he didn't want, the pain he truly, deeply wanted to avoid. He wants to let go, to fall back out of awareness.

"No, Solo, you don't get to do this, you _asshole—"_

A sigh, a whisper by his ear: "Chop shop..."

"Yes, it's me, we're here, I'm so sorry it took so— Oh thank God, he's alive."

The voices are coming slowly, from far away. There may not be much of a choice left to him, at this point. Sometimes, it's too hard to come back.

"There are paramedics on board, you're both going to be fine, everything's going to be—"

He falls.

* * *

. . .

* * *

_okay so this has been in my drafts for [checks calendar] like four fucking years and it was probably never to turn into anything real, so here. feast on the refuse._


	2. secret injury

_the only safety lay in self-sufficiency. he learned that the hard way, and he never forgot._

_warnings for __descriptions of injuries, mentions of disordered eating, and some fairly fucked up coping mechanisms, because this is Solo, but nothing beyond what I would consider canon-typical._

* * *

_. . ._

* * *

He learned young that reliance was dangerous. It courted vulnerability and invited disaster, because other people would inevitably let you down.

No, the only safety lay in self-sufficiency. He learned that the hard way, and he never forgot.

* * *

He was ten when he learned that showing weakness only made him weaker. Ten years old, and too smart, too sharp, too thin. He learned to keep his constant gnawing hunger locked away, never to mention it to his teachers or his mother, and certainly not to his fellow students.

The longer he kept it quiet, the more he could believe it was normal.

He told himself that one meal a day was enough, and he started to believe it, started to embrace it, started to let it make him feel strong.

He lived that way for a year, and when the shortage ended he found it hard to change his mind.

* * *

Solo still does his part. He doesn't let himself get too comfortable with the idea of always having competent people around, and makes sure that he's still holding tight to his discipline.

"You're limping," Illya mutters to him on the way to their morning briefing one day.

"Am I?" He hadn't noticed. "My apologies." It takes a few steps to notice what the problem is, but then he locates it – stiffness in his knee, an unwillingness to bend, no doubt the product of a poorly landed rooftop jump the night before – and forcibly smooths his gait around it. It hurts, but it's better than overcompensating and straining his other leg as well. He'll be able to tune it out in a few more steps anyway, recalibrating the motions and sensations of his stride to anticipate the pinch and accommodate it.

"I didn't tell you so you could hide it," Illya says, sounding exasperated.

"What I do with the information I get is up to my discretion, Peril. Besides, limps are conspicuous. Best not to be seen with one – makes you memorable."

He lengthens his stride and pulls ahead to walk with Gaby, leaving Illya to mutter something unflattering in his wake.

* * *

There's a bullet in his upper arm and it's really quite uncomfortable, but in a few hours he'll be used to it, and there's no reason he shouldn't start those hours now.

The kickback from the semi-automatic rifle is _hell_ on it, though.

Warehouse shoot-outs are always such fun.

Illya slams into the wall next to him just in time to miss a volley of bullets. "Gaby's hit," he says over the noise. "You get her, I'll cover you."

Normally it would go the other way around – Illya's stronger and faster, and Napoleon's very slightly the better shot. "You're hit too, aren't you," he accuses, then peeks around the corner to sight his approach. There's plenty of cover, but the acrobatics required to make use of it are going to be a mite painful. Not that that matters, in the face of everything else.

"Go," Illya repeats. That's a yes, then. Fantastic. Three for three. Normally their opponents aren't this lucky.

Napoleon nods curtly, shoulders his rifle (_fuck_, but that hurts), and goes.

He gets clipped once more, this time along the outside of his thigh, but otherwise makes it to Gaby safe and sound. It's still numb for now, and he intends to make the most of it. The shots echoing around the cavernous structure are coming less and less frequently, but they're still too often and too erratic for a fool-proof exit strategy. The quicker they leave, the better.

Gaby has a bloody hand pressed to her side and murder in her eyes, and she scowls at him as he dives to the ground behind the bundle of thick metal piping currently sheltering her. "Illya's covering us," he says shortly. "Stay close to me, and you'll be fine."

"He's hurt," she guesses flatly.

Napoleon nods, and she snorts.

"Lady Luck must have a soft spot for you," she says.

He smiles tightly. Lady Luck has never given a damn about him; he makes his own way, and always has. "Ready to go?"

He calls in an extraction once they're out, puts a tourniquet on Illya's calf and presses down with both hands on the hole in Gaby's flank, ignoring the fire in his arm with a skill honed long ago.

He convinces them that he's wearing their blood rather than his own, and when the extraction team arrives he convinces them of the same. He doesn't really know why, but once he has he can't take it back.

The medics load Gaby and Illya into a helicopter, and Napoleon takes advantage of the chaos to lift a pair of forceps and some gauze from the surgical kits onboard. He tucks them into one of the pockets of his tactical uniform, and when they land at the chosen hospital he slips away to the bathroom and pulls the bullet out of his arm. He packs it with the gauze and makes a mental note to clean it as soon as he can get his hands on a bottle of antiseptic.

There's nothing he can do about the other one, too shallow and too wide, but it's not bleeding so freely anymore, so he presses against it until it stops, then heads back to the waiting room. He gets some odd looks, but no one dares approach, and the doctors and nurses are busy enough with their patients that they don't have a chance to look too closely.

Illya's out of surgery first. He needed some deep tissue sutures in the muscle of his calf, but he'll be fine in a few weeks. Gaby takes longer, and naturally Illya is too preoccupied to notice that the blood on Napoleon's clothes hasn't dried.

Gaby's fine too, eventually. Flesh wound – lots of blood, no damage to anything vital. It will take time for the muscles in her side to heal, though, and Waverly understands that. She and Illya get four weeks of leave. Solo gets put on a plane to Baghdad, where the cheap airline vodka sears its way across his skin, and his reflection in the scratched-up restroom mirror looks dreadful.

The ache of his injuries has settled deep into his body, and he tries not to relish it too much.

* * *

The most enduring lesson he ever learned was that he should never have to compete for attention. If no one noticed him, then there was nothing worth noticing. If no one saw his pain or his fatigue, then it wasn't bad enough to merit complaint, and he set his jaw and kept on going.

If someone _did_ notice, he lied, and kept on going anyway.

He could afford to be overlooked. He knew his limits, knew his boundaries. Not everyone had his discipline. Not everyone had his training. He _should_ be held to higher standards. He _should_ be expected to endure more, because he could.

He _should_ be.

It was _right_.

It was _fair_.

* * *

In Baghdad his arm gets infected, and he cleans it furiously, hurling silent insults and invectives at himself for being so careless. When routine cleaning doesn't work, he sharpens and sterilizes his switchblade and strips away as much of the damaged flesh as he can. When that doesn't work, he drinks three glasses of water and wraps the wound in salt-soaked gauze to pull out the infection. It hurts like the devil and dehydrates him horribly, but it works.

He gets a week off afterwards, and if he uses it to lie low and sleep off the remnants of the fever, no one has to know.

* * *

He doesn't get sick much as a child, but when he does, he goes to school and does his homework and helps his mother around the house. He does this because he has to, because there are no alternatives. As long as he's alive, life goes on.

* * *

The morning he wakes up with a rasping cough and a feeling of unnatural warmth in his face and neck, he gives himself thirty seconds to be annoyed before he shoves back the blankets and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. He's in his own room this time, which is for the best.

He coughs and shivers his way through his morning routine, taking advantage of his solitude to get as much of it out of his system as he can. By the time he knocks on Illya's door, he's counting breaths to keep the cough at bay and clenching his hands in his pockets to hide the shakiness of his fingers.

Illya opens the door and immediately narrows his eyes. "You're sick," he says.

Napoleon rolls his eyes. "It's a _cold_, Peril. Hardly anything to get worked up about."

Illya still looks suspicious, but he lets him in, and they get to work.

He keeps it up for over a week, across two different missions. The second one is harder, because he's sharing a room with Gaby. Eventually he can't keep the coughing contained around her anymore, and she goes from exasperation to concern in the course of a day. It's deeper now, and wetter, and it wakes him up – wakes them both up – during the night.

The third night it happens, Gaby asks him if he wants to go to a doctor. He declines.

The fourth night, Gaby asks him if he _needs_ to, and he's honestly not sure anymore. He hasn't slept properly in days, his chest is aching fiercely, and he can tell his concentration is starting to suffer for it.

"I'll see how I feel in the morning," he decides at last, and tosses and turns for hours before falling into a murky, confusing sleep.

It takes everything he has the next morning to push himself upright. His vision is swimming, his head is pounding, and every breath is like broken ribs and bruises. But he's alive, so life goes on. He's trying to get ready for the next step – standing up – when Gaby puts a hand on his shoulder and undoes all of his hard work by pushing him back down against the pillow. "I don't think so," she says tightly.

"Just—" _give me a minute_, he means to say, but his voice catches and he coughs harshly. It sounds awful and feels worse, phlegm sucking and rattling in his lungs, and he can't get it out. Eventually he gives up, too exhausted to keep trying.

"Still want to work?" Gaby asks lightly.

"Doesn't matter what I want," he points out, breathless and gravelly. "I have to."

"You _can't_."

She _really_ isn't helping his resolve.

"Gaby," he starts, and ruins it by coughing again. It _hurts_, and he's had worse before, he's worked through injuries and illness and exhaustion, but he can't remember feeling this wrung-out, this weak. He knows he has a fever, has for a couple of days now, and maybe it's worse than he thought, and that's why he's letting himself imagine what it would be like if he _did_ just spend the day in bed.

Then he thinks about getting up and getting dressed, about styling his hair and pretending that everything's fine, and it's so exhausting to even contemplate that to his utter horror and disgust he feels the telltale burn of tears at the back of his throat. Gaby must see it, or sense it somehow, because her fingers start brushing through his hair and she's making quiet, soothing sounds.

He's so tired, so unbearably tired, but he'll do what he always does and get through it. He's still alive, so life goes on.

"Ten minutes," he says, and hates how much it sounds like a plea, despises how rough and choked his voice is. "Ten more minutes, and then I'll get up."

"What?" Gaby actually sounds shocked. "No, Napoleon, you're not getting up at _all_. Illya's out getting medicine for you, and you're going to stay here and take it and _rest_."

He coughs again, because his timing is terrible and his life is very unfair, and Gaby helps him sit up so he can really put his back into it. He has to rest his forehead on his knees for a while afterwards to let the dizziness fade, and he feels more pathetic than ever: sitting in bed, hugging his knees, Gaby's hand moving up and down his back despite the sweat he can feel dampening his shirt.

Illya finds them like that a few minutes later, knocking once before stepping into the room. "How is he?" he asks.

"He has a bad fever," Gaby says softly, "and I'm worried about the cough."

"I'm right here, you know," Napoleon reminds them, lifting his head.

Illya doesn't even blink. "You look terrible."

"Thanks, Peril." He coughs against his knees, and winces at a particularly gruesome rattle.

"I have medicine for cough and fever," Illya says after a long pause. "I do not think it will be enough, but we will try it."

And really, he wants to tell them to go, to leave him alone and stop treating him like a child, but the sheer relief of knowing that he won't have to do everything himself is overwhelming.

"Okay," he says.

He lets Illya hand him pills and feed him a spoonful of thick, vile cough medicine. He doesn't even try to hold the spoon himself, just opens his mouth and lets Illya slip it in. Gaby gets him a cold cloth for his forehead, which feels so heavenly that he'll forgive the cliché, and Illya folds an extra blanket at the foot of his bed in case he wants it later.

They make him drink a glass of water, then refill it and leave it on the bedside table.

They leave the cough medicine and spoon, along with a note about when he can take another dose if he needs it.

There's still the mission, of course, and they have to leave him, but they do what they can to make it easier for him to take care of himself.

He spends the day in bed, alternately sleeping and coughing. He coughs until his throat is raw and his chest is tight with pain, but he can't bring anything up. He's just too tired. Every breath rattles wetly, and it's taking more and more effort to pull them in and force them out, but he really doesn't have the energy to care.

He doesn't fully wake on his partners' return, which is marked by flurries of hands and voices and questions that don't quite make enough sense. If something's really wrong, they'll try harder to wake him up, they'll slap him around a little bit, they'll...

And then he's in a car, and wearing his coat somehow, and he _thinks_ it's Illya's side that he's slumped up against, but that doesn't make any sense because Illya wouldn't suffer him to let his head loll against his shoulder like this, wouldn't have a warm, strong arm around him holding him tight, wouldn't be trying to soothe him with gentle words and soft touches.

So it isn't Illya.

He's asleep again before he figures out who it actually is.

* * *

He wakes up in a hospital bed, stuck like a pincushion and feeling like he's been hit by a train. He can feel two IV lines and a catheter, the last of which he chooses to take as a reassuring sign that his kidneys are still with the program. Unfortunately, he can also feel the truly astonishing amount of pain wrapping around his rib cage and the leaden exhaustion weighing him down.

"Bacterial pneumonia," Waverly says drily, from just outside of his periphery, because of course Waverly's here to see him in his shame. Of course he wouldn't be allowed the dignity of being miserable in private; no, he's to be made a spectacle of, made an example. There's the sound of paper moving, like pages turning in a file. "Which, naturally, you did not make known to anyone until it became impossible to hide," Waverly goes on, and turns another page. "You also have a couple of rather surprising bullet holes that don't seem to have made it into your medical records, as well as a few old cracked ribs – also unreported – and some bloodwork that would seem to indicate a rather inadvisable habit of skipping meals."

The file closes with a soft clap, then there's a slight creak as Waverly leans forward into Napoleon's line of sight.

He doesn't look angry, or disappointed, or scornful. He just looks determined.

"I think it's time we have a talk, Mr. Solo."

* * *

. . .

* * *

_another old one from my drafts. i kept trying to make it beautiful, but it wanted to be bare, so here it is._


End file.
